This may be one of the most interesting Pyrex promotional pieces we’ve come across. We say “may” because there is some doubt as to whether this was an actual promotional casserole pattern, or if it was somehow produced by a third party working on an existing casserole.

First off, we have yet to find an accepted name for this one, so we’ve decided to call this the Sol Flower Promotional Casserole pattern for now. This comes from the obvious Southwestern / Native American motif on the lid. This pattern could have easily been labeled with words like “Pueblo”, “Navajo”, or “Aztec” but these names have frequently been used to describe other pieces so we wanted to avoid confusion. In particular, the promotional casserole design known as “Old Pueblo” has a similar pattern on the lid.

Going back to our semi-doubts on just how authentic this piece is, we originally knew it only from 1 auction that showed the casserole. The problem is that from just a picture, it sure looks like the orange and black lid is hand-painted or decorated. Then, on a trip to the wine country we ended up finding this exact casserole, thus dispelling the hand-painted theory. It is clearly screen printed somehow onto the lid in a semi-professional pattern. Still, we’re not sure where it comes from.

The actual casserole has a clear lid printed with a series of concentric wavy “flower” circles in orange and black that definitely have some sort of Native American look to them. The pattern is printed only on the outside (as opposed to a few other orange / black clear casserole lids that are printed on both sides). The casserole base is a standard 1 quart #473 model that is a solid custard yellow in color… it sort of looks like it could be in the “Daisy” pattern family of colors.

Again, it seems unlikely that some third party company actually bought up a bunch of these yellow type casseroles and then proceeded to print the pattern on the lids. That’s just an unbelieveable amount of trouble - you would at least expect them to print some sort of advertisement or identifying mark saying that it was them. Otherwise, why go through the trouble? But until we can find some proof that Pyrex actually printed these lids, we aren’t ruling that out. We would appreciate if anyone else has information on the pattern and especially a picture of an original box that this came in. It makes it more difficult that there is no commonly accepted name… so if you’re going to auction one of these, please try calling it by the name we made up for it, “Sol Flower”, so that we can find it!

Update (10/11/2006): We’re now fairly certain that this is an actual pattern because we’ve seen it appear in auctions coming from different locations several times.

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